AMSTERDAM.- This summer a special exhibition about the Russian photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii will be on show at the Geelvinck Hinlopen Museum in Amsterdam. This pioneer in colour photography captured the population in different area's of the vast Russian empire in colour with financial support of Tsar Nicolas II. The selection of photographs at this exhibition shows the ethnic diversity of a vanished great power. The images, as the photographer stated in his days, were made with an eye to the historical value of the subject. The early twentieth century photographs are not only remarkable because of the subject matter. The intensity of the colours and the sharpness of the images are as well of extraordinary quality. Early 1900 Prokudin-Gorskii developed his own method of colour photography. The basis for his approach essentially consisted of a three-phase black and white recording made through a red, green and blue filter. The glass plates were projected with a self-built three-colour filter projector resulting in a colour image. With the assistance of the current digital technology these colour images can be reconstructed from the past. The Prokudin-Gorskii collection resides at the Library of Congress in Washington and thanks to a large digitalisation project colour images of pre-revolutionary Russia is available for the public.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of Picturebox, Flevodruk, Spigthoff en Lintberg.

A book about the photographer Prokudin-Gorskii will be published by d'jonge Hond in June 2008 and is available at the museum store.